by John Updike
“That I love you.”
“Oh, really? Well, same here. That trip was fun. I feel satisfied.”
In the long slow trundle to their gate, she asks him shyly, “Was Thelma better than me?”
He is too grateful to be down to lie. “In ways. How about Webb?”
She nods and nods, as if to spill the last tears from her eyes.
He answers for her, “The bastard was great.”
She leans her head against his shoulder. “Why do you think I’ve been crying?”
Shocked, he admits, “I thought about Nelson.”
Janice sniffs once more, so loudly that one man already on his feet, arranging a Russian-style fur cap upon his sunburned bald head, briefly stares. She concedes, “It was, mostly,” and she and Harry clasp hands once more, conspirators.
At the end of miles of airport corridor Ma Springer is standing apart from the cluster of other greeters. In the futuristic perspectives of this terminal she looks shrunken and bent, wearing her second-best coat, not the mink but a black cloth trimmed with silver fox, and a little cherry-red brimless hat with folded-back net that might get by in Brewer but appears quaint here, among the cowboys and the slim kids ofindeterminate sex with their cropped hair dyed punk-style in pastel feathers and the black chicks whose hair is frizzed up in structures like three-dimensional Mickey Mouse ears. Hugging her, Rabbit feels how small the old lady, once the terror of his young manhood, has become. Her former look of having been stuffed tight with Koerner pride and potential indignation has fled, leaving her skin collapsed in random folds and bloodless. Deep liverish gouges underscore her eyes, and her wattled throat seems an atrocious wreck of flesh.
She can hardly wait to speak, backing a step away to give her voice room to make its impact. “The baby came last night. A girl, seven pounds and some. I couldn’t sleep a wink, after getting her to the hospital and then waiting for the doctor to call.” Her voice is shaky with blame. The airport Muzak, a tune being plucked on the strings of many coordinated violins, accompanies her announcement in such triumphant rhythm that Harry and Janice have to suppress smiles, not even daring to step closer in the jostle and shufe, the old lady is so childishly, precariously intent on the message she means to deliver. “And then all the way down on the Turnpike, trucks kept tooting their horns at me, tooting these big foghorns they have. As if there were someplace else I could go; I couldn’t drive the Chrysler off the road,” Bessie says. “And after Conshohocken, on the Expressway, it’s really a wonder I wasn’t killed. I never saw so much traffic, though I thought at noon it would be letting up, and you know the signs, they aren’t at all clear even if you have good eyes. All the way along the river I kept praying to Fred and I honestly believe it was him that got me here, I couldn’t have done it alone.”
And, her manner plainly implies, she will never attempt anything like it again; Janice and Harry find her at the terminus of the last great effort of her life. Henceforth, she is in their hands.
V
YET MA SPRINGER wasn’t so totally thrown by events that she didn’t have the wit to call up Charlie Stavros and have him come back to the lot. His own mother took a turn for the worse in December - her whole left side feels numb, so even with a cane it frightens her to walk - and as Charlie predicted his cousin Gloria went back to Norristown and her husband, though Charlie wouldn’t give it a year; so he has been pretty well tied down. This time it’s Harry who’s come back with a tan. He gives Charlie a two-handed handclasp, he’s so happy to see him at Springer Motors again. The Greek sales rep doesn’t look that hot, however: those trips to Florida were like a paint job. He looks pale. He looks as if you pricked his skin he’d bleed gray. He stand hunched over protecting his chest like he’d smoked three packs a day all his life, though Charlie like most Mediterranean types has never really had the self-destructive habits you see in northern Europeans and Negroes. Harry wouldn’t have given him such an all-out handshake this way a week ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass he’s felt freer, more in love with the world again.
“The old mastoras. You look great,” he exuberantly lies to Charlie.
“I’ve felt better,” Charlie tells him. “Thank God it hasn’t been any kind of a winter so far.” Harry can see, through the plate-glass window, a snowless, leafless landscape, the dust of all seasons swirling and drifting, intermixed with the paper refuse from the Chuck Wagon that has blown across Route 111. A new banner is up: THE ERA OF COROLLA. Toyota = Total Economy. Charlie volunteers, “It’s pretty damn depressing, watching Manna mou head straight downhill. She gets out of bed just to go to the bathroom and keeps telling me I ought to get married.”
“Good advice, maybe.”
“Well, I made a little move on Gloria in that direction, and it may be what scared her back to her husband. That guy, what a shit. She’ll be back.”
“Wasn’t she a cousin?”
“All the better. Peppy type. About four eleven, little heavy in the rumble seat, not quite classy enough for you, champ. But cute. You should see her dance. I hadn’t been to those Hellenic Society Saturday nights for years, she talked me into it. I loved to watch her sweat.”
“You say she’ll be back.”
“Yeah but not for me. I’ve missed that boat.” He adds, “I’ve missed a lot of boats.”
“Who hasn’t?”
Charlie rolls a toothpick in the center of his lower lip. Harry doesn’t like to look at him closely; he’s become one of those old Brewer geezers who go into cigar stores to put ten dollars on the numbers and hang around the magazine racks waiting for a conversation. “You’ve caught a few,” he ventures to tell Harry.
“No, listen. Charlie. I’m in rotten shape. A kid who’s disappeared and a new house with no furniture in it.” Yet these facts, species of emptiness and new possibility, excite and please him more than not.
“The kid’ll turn up,” Charlie says. “He’s just letting off steam.”
“That’s what Pru says. You never saw anybody so calm, considering. We went up to the hospital last night after getting in from the islands and, Jesus, is she happy about that baby. You’d think she was the first woman in the history of the world to pull this off. I guess she was worried about the kid being normal, after that fall she took a while ago.”
“Worried about herself, more likely. Girl like that who’s been knocked around a lot by life, having a baby’s the one way they can prove to themselves they’re human. What’re they thinking of calling it?”
“She doesn’t want to call it after her mother, she wants to name it after Ma. Rebecca. But she wants to wait to hear from Nelson, because, you know, that was his sister’s name. The infant that, you know, didn’t make it.”
“Yeah.” Charlie understands. Inviting bad luck. The sound of Mildred Kroust’s typewriter bridges their silence. In the shop one of Manny’s men is pounding an uncooperative piece of metal. Charlie asks, “What’re you going to do about the house?”
“Move in, Janice says. She surprised me, the way she talked to her mother. Right in the car driving home. She told her she was welcome to move in with us but she didn’t see why she couldn’t have a house of her own like other women her age and since Pru and the baby were obviously going to have to stay she doesn’t want her to feel crowded in her own home. Bessie, that is.”
“Huh. About time Jan stood on her own two feet. Wonder who she’s been talking to?”
Webb Murkett, it occurs to Harry, through a tropical night of love; but things always work best between him and Charlie when they don’t go too deep into Janice. He says, “The trouble with having the house is we have no furniture of our own. And everything costs a fucking fortune. A simple mattress and box spring and steel frame to set it on for six hundred dollars; if you add a headboard that’s another six hundred. Carpets! Three, four thousand for a little Oriental, and they all come out of Iran and Afghanistan. The salesman was telling me they’re a better investment than gold.”
“Gold’s doing p
retty well,” Charlie says.
“Better than we are, huh? Have you had a chance to look at the books?”
“They’ve looked better,” Charlie admits. “But nothing a little more inflation won’t cure. Young couple came in here Tuesday, the first day I got the call from Bessie, and bought a Corvette convertible Nelson had laid in. Said they wanted a convertible and thought the dead of winter would be a good time to buy one. No trade-in, weren’t interested in financing, paid for it with a check, a regular checking account. Where do they get the money? Neither one of ‘em could have been more than twenty-five. Next day, yesterday, kid came in here in a GMC pick-up and said he’d heard we had a snowmobile for sale. It took us a while to find it out back but when we did he got that light in his eyes so I began by asking twelve hundred and we settled at nine seventy-five. I said to him, There isn’t any snow, and he said, That’s all right, he was moving up to Vermont, to wait out the nuclear holocaust. Said Three-Mile Island really blew his mind. D’y’ever notice how Carter can’t say `nuclear’? He says `nookier.’ “
“You really got rid of that snowmobile? I can’t believe it.”
“People don’t care about economizing anymore. Big Oil has sold capitalism down the river. What the czar did for the Russians, Big Oil is doing for us.”
Harry can’t take the time to talk economics today. He apologizes, “Charlie, I’m still on vacation in theory, to the end of the week, and Janice is meeting me downtown, we got a thousand things to do in connection with this damn house of hers.”
Charlie nods. “Amscray. I got some sorting out to do myself. One thing nobody could accuse Nelson of is being a neatness ‘freak.” He shouts after Harry as he goes into the corridor for his hat and coat, “Say hello to Grandma for me!”
Meaning Janice, Harry slowly realizes.
He ducks into his office, where the new 1980 company calendar with its photo of Fujiyama hangs on the wall. He makes a mental note to himself, not for the first time, to do something about those old clippings that hang outside on the pressed-board partition, they’re getting too yellow, there’s a process he’s heard about where they photograph old halftones so they look white as new, and can be blown up to any size. Might as well blow them up big, it’s a business expense. He takes from old man Springer’s heavy oak coat-rack with its four little bow legs the sheepskin overcoat Janice got him for Christmas and the little narrow-brim suede hat that goes with it. At his age you wear a hat. He went all through last winter without a cold, because he had taken to wearing a hat. And vitamin C helps. Next it’ll be Geritol. He hopes he didn’t cut Charlie short but he found talking to him today a little depressing, the guy is at a dead end and turning cranky. Big Oil doesn’t know any more what’s up than Little Oil. But then from Harry’s altitude at this moment anyone might look small and cranky. He has taken off, he is flying high, on his way to an island in his life. He takes a tube of Life Savers (Butter Rum) from his top lefthand desk drawer, to sweeten his breath in case he’s kissed, and lets himself out through the back of the shop. He is careful with the crash bar: a touch of grease on this sheepskin and there’s no getting it off.
* * *
Nelson having stolen his Corona, Harry has allocated to himself a grape-blue Celica Supra, the “ultimate Toyota,” with padded dash, electric tachometer, state-of-the-art four-speaker solid-state AM/FM/MPX stereo, quartz-accurate digital clock, automatic overdrive transmission, cruise control, computer-tuned suspension, ten-inch disc brakes on all four wheels, and quartz halogen hi-beam headlights. He loves this smooth machine. The Corona for all its dependable qualities was a stodgy little bug, whereas this blue buzzard has charisma. The blacks along lower Weiser really stared yesterday afternoon when he drove it home. After Janice and he had brought Ma back to 89 Joseph in the Chrysler (which in fact even Harry found not so easy to steer, after a week of being driven in taxis on the wrong side of the road), they put her to bed and came into town in the Mustang, Janice all hyper after her standing up for herself about the house, to Schaechner Furniture, where they looked at beds and ugly easy chairs and Parsons tables like the Murketts had, only not so nice as theirs, the wood grain not checkerboarded. They couldn’t make any decisions; when the store was about to close she drove him over to the lot so he could have a car too. He picked this model priced in five digits. Blacks stared out from under the neon Signs, JIMBO’s Friendly LOUNGE and LIVE ENTERTAINMENT and ADULT ADULT ADULT, as he slid by in virgin blue grapeskin; he was afraid some of them lounging in the cold might come running out at a stoplight and scratch his hood with a screwdriver or smash his windshield with a hammer, taking vengeance for their lives. On a number of walls now in this part of town you can see spray-painted SKEETER LIVES, but they don’t say where.
He has lied to Charlie. He doesn’t have to meet Janice until one-thirty and it is now only 11:17 by the Supra’s quartz clock. He is driving to Galilee. He turns on the radio and its sound is even punkier, richer, more many-leaved and many-layered, than that of the radio in the old Corona. Though he moves the dial from left to right and back again he can’t find Donna Summer, she went out with the Seventies. Instead there is a guy singing hymns, squeezing the word “Jesus” until it drips. And that kind of mellow mixed-voice backup he remembers from the records when he was in high school: the jukeboxes where you could see the record fall and that waxy rustling cloth, organdy or whatever, the girls went to dances in, wearing the corsage you gave them. The corsage would get crushed as the dancing got closer and the girls’ perfumes would be released from between their powdery breasts as their bodies were warmed and pressed by partner after partner, in the violet light of the darkened gym, crépe-paper streamers drooping overhead and the basketball hoops wreathed with paper flowers, all those warm bodies softly bumping in anticipation of the cold air stored in cars outside, the little glowing dashboard -lights, the body heat misting the inside of the windshield, the organdy tugged and mussed, chilly fingers fumbling through coats and pants and underpants, clothes become a series of tunnels, Mary Ann’s body nestling toward his hands, the space between her legs so different and mild and fragrant and safe, a world apart. And now, the news, on the half hour. That wise-voiced young woman is long gone from this local station, Harry wonders where she is by now, doing go-go or assistant vice-president at Sunflower Beer. The new announcer sounds like Billy Fosnacht, fat-upped. President Carter has revealed that he personally favors a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Reaction from athletes is mixed. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has backed off from yesterday’s apparently pro-Soviet stance on Afghanistan. On the crowded campaign trail, U.S. Representative Philip Crane of Illinois has labelled as “foolish” Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy’s proposal that the Seabrook, New Hampshire, proposed nuclear plant be converted to coal. In Japan, former Beatle Paul McCartney was jailed on charges of possessing eight ounces of marijuana. In Switzerland, scientists have succeeded in programming bacteria to manufacture the scarce human protein interferon, an anti-viral agent whose artificial production may usher in an era as beneficial to mankind as the discovery of penicillin. Meanwhile, if the fillings in your teeth cost more, it’s because the price of gold hit eight hundred dollars an ounce in New York City today. Fuck. He sold too soon. Eight hundred times thirty equals twenty-four thousand, that’s up nearly ten grand from fourteen six, if he’d just held on, damn that Webb Murkett and his silver. And the 76ers continue their winning ways, 121 to 110 over the Portland Trail Blazers at the Spectrum last night. Poor old Eagles out of their misery, Jaworski went down flinging. And now, to continue our program of Nice Music for Nice Folks, the traditional melody “Savior, Keep a Watch Over Me.” Harry turns it off, driving to the purr of the Supra.
He knows the way now. Past the giant Amishman pointing to the natural cave, through the narrow town with its Purina feedstore sign and old inn and new bank and hitching posts and tractor agency. The corn stubble of the fields sticks up pale, all the gold bleached from it. The duck pond has frozen ed
ges but a wide center of black water, so mild has the winter been. He slows past the Blankenbiller and Muth mailboxes, and turns down the driveway where the box says BYER. His nerves are stretched so nothing escapes his vision, the jutting stones of the two beaten reddish tracks that make the old road, the fringe of dried weeds each still bearing the form its green life assumed in the vanished summer, the peeling pumpkin-colored school bus husk, a rusting harrow, a small springhouse whitewashed years ago, and then the shabby farm buildings, corn crib and barn and stone house, approached from a new angle, for the first time from the front. He drives the Celica into the space of packed dirt where he once saw the Corolla pull in; in turning off the engine and stepping from the car he sees the ridge from which he spied, a far scratchy line of black cherry and gum trees scarcely visible through the apple trees of the orchard, farther away than it had felt, the odds were no one had ever seen him. This is crazy. Run.
